Laughter (after talking with Stephanie B.)

Why start with laughter and not with comedy, or humor, as genres which produce laughter?

Laughter is a bodily response.

It is public (even if someone is alone, it sounds it registers somewhere, maybe imperceptibly, in the social).

Laughter can be ambivalent, maybe always is. It has many motivations, and a range of effects. There is sick laughter, laughter that makes you sick. And laughter that keeps us from being sick, laughter as a defense or a deflection. There is joyful involuntary laughter. Lots of laughter is involuntary, it starts in the body and emerges before editing can stop it (sometimes). There is laughter as avoidance (not involuntary). We laugh because we are uncomfortable. This is a tic, another kind of body-behavior.

Because laughter is a comment, it can be political; it is maybe always political, if we dilate the meaning of political to include critical interactions with others.

Laughter is a comment, a mode of critique, because it reacts to a provocation. The reaction it registers expresses identification or dis-, anger or lightness, compliance or resistance (one can not laugh at a joke, even a funny one). You can hurt someone's feelings with a laugh, or with the withholding of a laugh. Laughter is also public, which means that it is a reverberation through a situation—it can't not be a comment. it is a Lyotardian phrase. It can be more or less legible (e.g. one can laugh and someone in the room might not know what the laughter is about). It bounces off others, at least their hearing. When it does, it changes the sense of the scene, the feel and texture of that place. It makes it a different place. This is about laughter's liveness. Which means that it also bounces off people's hearts, their own laughter and politics. Laughter alone can start a room laughing (there is a formalism of laughter; e.g. the sound of it, the bounce, the movement of the stomach (up and down), how silly it sounds when repeated, when divorced from its provocation).

I don't want to deal with a genre; I want to deal with an encounter. Laughter is an encounter. A response to one and it forces one, another one, or amplifies the same.

I don't want to deal with a structure of intention, where the analytic categories of encounter that fall out involve getting it or not, liking it or not, seeing it or not.... I want to deal with structures of impact. They don't need to be dramatic; laughter isn't always dramatic. Laughter can cut drama, de-fuse tension. Laughter isn't dramatic because its comment, its effects, it provocations don't always last. The sound of laughter fades (but it is awkward to stop laughing...why? Does it want to have a history? Does it want to proceed into something cognate, something equally or more intense? Does laughter want to produce more laughter, is that our inclination? Is it awkward to acknowledge in public that laughter dies, that it yields to more bored locutions? Is the cessation of laughter an acknowledgement that intensities require collaborative work to get to them, requires bodies working together to produce the intensity of a scene that escalates to laughter? To stop means that participants have to start again, and that it takes time and work to get there. We might not get there. Laughter is confirmation that the situation is as fun as people wanted it to be; laughter is confirmation of the success of some social situations. It's working. People don't want to stop laughing. But laughter is also tiring; faces get tired. But something about the affect of amusement, or mirth, gets taxed, or is taxing of something else.).

Structure of impact, or structures of encounter. Something happens, then adjustments. People laugh with you or do not. They might ask what you're laughing at, wanting to participate. They may ask what you're laughing at, not wanting to participate but to kill the laughter at the root. Laughter mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. It registers the presence of something you know with some detourning of that something (Bergson says this, I think; maybe Baudelaire too; satire presupposes repetition/familiarity; superiority suggests the process of making something familiar so as to dominate it). Laughter is the adjustment, the process of adjusting, to the unfamiliarity aspect of something that had been familiar.

Laughter is an adjustment. This is also why it is critical and/or a comment. This is also why it's political.

Adjustments can be like coping, but coping might involve getting numb to a bad situation, or making gestures toward moving something, changing something. A situation can be adjusted or one can adjust oneself. Laughter might lead in either direction. Adorno's fear is that, in the culture industry, where laughter itself is coded for, marketed for, studied, it can only lead to adjustment as numbing.

If an adjustment is something that can operate on the self or operate on the social, then it will be responsive to historical shifts in the operations of power on the self. The disciplinary self makes adjustments by looking inward, by constructing a sense of self that can be adjusted, by accepting responsibility for the impacts of the social on the self, by accepting that the only thing that can really be changed with any sort of reliability is the self. The biopolitical self...it's unclear actually. How much does one experience biopolitical being? Or is it not a structure of experience? If one did experience it, incorporate it, where would adjustments be made? it's not like people don't believe in self-help anymore; it's that governmentality has shifted its ways of conceptualizing people, selfhood-as-population-life. ???

An adjustment: this is the sense in which FGT's spills might register laughter as a mode of critical response to minimalist sculpture. It adjusts that sculpture's relation to a situation, to the movement of bodies, to a space/place, to the nonplace of galleries, to consumption, to sexuality (sucking), to participation. FGT's spills laugh at Carl Andre, at Serra. Meaning not that they mock them, necessarily. Rather, they adjust them and adjust to them. At their most grandiose, they might also help them adjust to a new political situation: not '68 but AIDS. Laughter then would be a specific affective modality of appropriation. It would also have a relation to re-enactment.